US general overseeing prisons says she was 'set up,' suspended

WASHINGTON -- About two months after the Red Cross warned US commanders of widespread prisoner abuses, the commanding general at the Abu Ghraib prison assured the Red Cross in a confidential letter that Iraqi detainees were being given the best treatment possible and that even more ''improvements are continually being made."

In an interview yesterday, however, Brigadier General Janis Karpinski insisted she was ''set up" by Army officials who had her sign the letter when she really had no idea of the depth of the problems uncovered at the now-infamous prison outside Baghdad.

In addition, Karpinski said she was notified in an e-mail yesterday that she was being suspended from duty, but has not yet been given a formal explanation.

''You'd think somebody would pick up the phone and call me," she said. ''That should have been the protocol courtesy. I am a general officer. Nobody could spend the 25 cents to call me?"

Karpinski's account of the letter and the sequence of events as the Abu Ghraib scandal began to emerge contradicts those of her superiors, who have said they did not react to the abuses sooner because it took months for the reports to reach their level.

The first report of abuses at Abu Ghraib was given to Army officials by the International Committee of the Red Cross in November. It was not until January, after an enlisted man working as a guard at Abu Ghraib passed photographs of the abuses to his superiors, that senior Army officials began to investigate.

But the letter Karpinski signed rejecting the original Red Cross allegations was written in December. If, as she insisted yesterday, the letter was drafted in part by advisers to Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the US ground commander in Iraq, that strongly suggests that the allegations of abuses had already reached Sanchez's headquarters.

In February, the Red Cross responded with a second report, a scathing account of what it called a series of ''main violations" of prisoners' rights.

Karpinski said in the interview yesterday that by late December military intelligence officials were basically running the prison, but wanted her to sign the letter to the Red Cross because, she said, ''I had no information whatsoever why these ICRC complaints were being registered."